Racing Turtles

Fuck landlords.

just sayin'

This should be taught in school.

Admittedly, when I first saw this headline, my immediate thought was, "yeah, no shit," but it's good to have studies giving hard numbers. It also makes me feel a little better, weirdly, because at least our struggles with rent aren't just because we suck at money or something. It's the system, not the individual.

I hate, hate, HATE the term “affordable housing.” I hate that we’ve normalized it. I hate that we just accept that the majority of housing, a basic human right, is unaffordable to much of the population. Housing should be affordable as a baseline. If rich people want to add arcades and gold-plated hot tubs on top so be it, but everyone, everyone, regardless of income level, should have access to a clean, comfortable home with enough light and space to make life worth living.

This is what happens when Wall St and private equity [BlackRock, Vanguard] manipulate the housing market for their portfolio profits, not your housing needs.

#ItsTheSameHouse

The US government (Bureau of Labor Statistics) offers an inflation calculator, and I wanted to put these values in there to see how the modern price compared adjusted for inflation.

It suggests that if the house's appreciation kept pace with inflation, it would be worth $294,949.03 today, just 21% of its listed value.

Here's the thing: imagine if we fixed the housing market, so that the price of housing only increased to match inflation. That would be great, right? Except, homeowners typically spend $2000-$10000 per year on maintenance. So homeownership would go from an investment to an endless money pit, just like renting. The idea of a house as an investment, a house as a way to build wealth, requires that housing prices increase faster than inflation forever, which means that the burden of housing costs on working people must keep increasing forever, and the number of homeless people must keep increasing forever.

The housing crisis isn't just a result of greedy landlords and investors. It's an inevitable result of social policies that encourage people to treat their houses as in investment. Because once a homeowner internalizes the idea that their financial future depends on housing prices going up, they start favoring policies (such as NIMBYism) that make housing prices go up.

Conversely, if we want to end homelessness for good, we need to accept that housing is someone we'll all have to continuously pour resources into, because buildings are complex physical objects that break a lot.

The reason I say this is because every time I read an article about the housing crisis, they always say something along the lines of “The housing crisis has robbed people of the opportunity to build wealth via homeownership!” without acknowledging that the housing crisis is what created the opportunity to build wealth via homeownership

#yah.#I don’t intend to sell my house to get another one#I’ve never thought that way#THEREFORE the house is an obvious money pit. like horses.#but a big chunk of society is people hopping up the salmon ladder of continually selling their homes#and like not even finishing paying the mortgage or anything?#that first big loan kicks them off and then they just go leaping up the ladder#until something goes wrong!#and there are enough of them for whom it has gone locally right that GOOD FUCKING LUCK changing anything(via@manyblinkinglights)

Yeah this is a good point like:

There are whole-ass NUMEROUS INDUSTRIES dedicated to encouraging people to become petty real-estate capitalists(See all the house flipping shows that run 24-7 on, like, 3 channels now), and so long as you have so much institutional weight behind driving people into house-flipping, you're going to have a hard time fixing housing-supply and house-price inflation, cuz the people invested in keeping that market hot(which includes increasing numbers of home-owners) will lobby against fixing it.

Oh wait: something just occurred to me:

Part of this problem is how difficult it has become to improve your material standards in the US generation-on-generation, let alone over one's own lifetime. Related to that is how vastly Debt Industries(Credit Cards, Mortgages, Banking in general; basically any Persistent Payments you have to make) have expanded into everyday life. And of course it doesn't help that the US celebrates and promotes wealth-building above everything else; that these very people being EXPLOITED by the Rentier class are also ENCOURAGED, by every form of media around them, to participate in that exploitation joyfully.

Like: REAL ESTATE SPECULATION IS NOT SAFE(See the Global Financial Crisis; tho that lasted WAY LONGER that a year, idk what that wiki headline is thinking, and when I say "Real Estate Speculation" I'm saying "THE BANKS USING REAL ESTATE DEBT AS COLLATERAL FOR INVESTMENT SECURITIES" not blaming the GFC on your local realtor[save in as much as they helped the banks do this by pushing jackpot loans with sweetheart teaser rates on first-time home buyers]), but for people WITH Houses, those Houses are the only source of Leverageable and INCREASING Wealth they HAVE, their wages have only DECREASED in real-terms over their whole damn lives, they know social security doesn't provide enough to live on with dignity(and of course: lots of Millennials have such a spotty work history or insignificant tax-presence that Social Security, as a pay-in system tracked and distributed through your tax-records, is going to be non-existence for them at retirement age), so they see this as the only real option they have for 1)achieving what their society has taught them to want, and 2)not being homeless in their old age.

So part of fixing this problem is going to HAVE TO BE providing people with that security, independent of home ownership. Wages need to go up. Social Security needs to be expanded and reformed to guarantee EVERYONE, regardless of pay-in, a DECENT standard of living in old-age(individual shelter, clothing, control over feeding themselves, control over their bodies, medical care, the ability to Do Stuff other than just sit in a box, etc); basically we need to identify the sources of anxiety in ppl's lives and assuage them, ON TOP OF Building just an absolute shit-ton of new housing, and getting rid of all these onerous housing-related zoning laws.

And also: Parking Minimums Must Be Destroyed

Here's the thing: imagine if we fixed the housing market, so that the price of housing only increased to match inflation. That would be great, right? Except, homeowners typically spend $2000-$10000 per year on maintenance. So homeownership would go from an investment to an endless money pit, just like renting. The idea of a house as an investment, a house as a way to build wealth, requires that housing prices increase faster than inflation forever, which means that the burden of housing costs on working people must keep increasing forever, and the number of homeless people must keep increasing forever.

The housing crisis isn't just a result of greedy landlords and investors. It's an inevitable result of social policies that encourage people to treat their houses as in investment. Because once a homeowner internalizes the idea that their financial future depends on housing prices going up, they start favoring policies (such as NIMBYism) that make housing prices go up.

Conversely, if we want to end homelessness for good, we need to accept that housing is someone we'll all have to continuously pour resources into, because buildings are complex physical objects that break a lot.

The reason I say this is because every time I read an article about the housing crisis, they always say something along the lines of “The housing crisis has robbed people of the opportunity to build wealth via homeownership!” without acknowledging that the housing crisis is what created the opportunity to build wealth via homeownership

#yah.#I don’t intend to sell my house to get another one#I’ve never thought that way#THEREFORE the house is an obvious money pit. like horses.#but a big chunk of society is people hopping up the salmon ladder of continually selling their homes#and like not even finishing paying the mortgage or anything?#that first big loan kicks them off and then they just go leaping up the ladder#until something goes wrong!#and there are enough of them for whom it has gone locally right that GOOD FUCKING LUCK changing anything(via@manyblinkinglights)

Yeah this is a good point like:

There are whole-ass NUMEROUS INDUSTRIES dedicated to encouraging people to become petty real-estate capitalists(See all the house flipping shows that run 24-7 on, like, 3 channels now), and so long as you have so much institutional weight behind driving people into house-flipping, you're going to have a hard time fixing housing-supply and house-price inflation, cuz the people invested in keeping that market hot(which includes increasing numbers of home-owners) will lobby against fixing it.

Here's the thing: imagine if we fixed the housing market, so that the price of housing only increased to match inflation. That would be great, right? Except, homeowners typically spend $2000-$10000 per year on maintenance. So homeownership would go from an investment to an endless money pit, just like renting. The idea of a house as an investment, a house as a way to build wealth, requires that housing prices increase faster than inflation forever, which means that the burden of housing costs on working people must keep increasing forever, and the number of homeless people must keep increasing forever.

The housing crisis isn't just a result of greedy landlords and investors. It's an inevitable result of social policies that encourage people to treat their houses as in investment. Because once a homeowner internalizes the idea that their financial future depends on housing prices going up, they start favoring policies (such as NIMBYism) that make housing prices go up.

Conversely, if we want to end homelessness for good, we need to accept that housing is someone we'll all have to continuously pour resources into, because buildings are complex physical objects that break a lot.

The reason I say this is because every time I read an article about the housing crisis, they always say something along the lines of “The housing crisis has robbed people of the opportunity to build wealth via homeownership!” without acknowledging that the housing crisis is what created the opportunity to build wealth via homeownership